City A.M. - 08 April 2008
By: Jeremy Hazlehurst
EUGENE KOHN is responsible for some of the biggest buildings on the planet. The Heron Tower on Bishopsgate, for example, which on completion will be the City’s tallest building at 47 floors.
The architect’s New York-based Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) partnership is also responsible for the Shanghai World Financial Center, which will be the tallest building in China “for a few moments”, anyway.
Another one of his projects is the new JP Morgan headquarters in New York. So his watercolours — an exhibition of which is being staged in Mayfair — offer something of a contrast, because they are small and intricate.
ESCAPE
“It’s an escape from bigness of buildings,” admits the softly spoken and almost unbelievably sprightly 77-year-old at the launch of the show at the Belgravia Gallery on Albermarle Street, which also includes works by Peter Blake, the British pop artist who designed the Sergeant Pepper album cover, and Nelson Mandela.
“I love the detail of a painting. Also, in buildings there are so many people involved — engineers, builders and of course clients. With painting there is just you. I’m the only one, and it’s about how I feel.”
There’s another way that painting offers a welcome change from his professional life too — it doesn’t take as long. Kohn says that his involvement on a building can last anything between four and 15 years. A watercolour takes considerably less time.
“There is great satisfaction in doing something that is finished quickly,” he smiles. Painting is in his blood. “On my mother’s hundredth birthday, she had an exhibition of a hundred of her paintings at the Guggenheim Museum in New York,” he says. “I started painting at the age of five at her side. She was an inspiration to me.”
Although his hobby offers a contrast to the work of building sky-scrapers, many of his pictures are actually of the built environment. One picture in the gallery shows the Tokyo skyline which he painted when he was in the city and unable to sleep. “I always take my paints with me when I travel,” he says. He says that he has also painted a picture of Manhattan with the “ghosts of the Twin Towers”.
Clearly, 9/11 haunts people who build tall buildings. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in 2001, some said that people would never again want to be in tall buildings.
DENSITY
“Unfortunately, 9/11 killed a lot of people,” he sighs. “But there are tall buildings going up all over the world so obviously the general public has not been put off them. We design them now so that they are safer, so that people could get out faster, for example.”
Tall buildings, he says, are quite simply necessary for big cities “for energy conservation, and as a response to the density of modern cities”. The future is mixed-use buildings with commercial, residential and shopping units in them, “small vertical cities” like the ones he is working on in China, Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
He’s also got some home truths for those who worry about the effect that new skyscrapers such as the Pinnacle and the Shard will have on London’s skyline.
SKYLINE
“London has got to realise that without Canary Wharf the City would not be the major financial centre that it is; the City has to continue that. “Without those sorts of buildings, the City will be in a very different position. It should be done sensitively, but they should alter the skyline. Look, Norman Foster’s Gherkin is a very beautiful building.”
And that, remember, is the opinion of an artist as well as an architect.
